Webinar: Time & Expense Management Strategies for Today’s World

We are excited to have Chris Harley of DATABASICS here today to address a topic many of our members have been discussing due to the changes COVID-19 is causing. I'd like to thank him for his time and expertise. And with that, I'm excited to hand the webinar off to Chris.

Yeah, thanks, Jessica. And thank you, everyone, for giving us some time here this afternoon or this morning, depending upon where you are in the world. As Jessica mentioned, my name is Chris Harley. I'm with DATABASICS. And really the topic we want to address today is, you know, the impacts and key challenges that we are seeing from companies as it relates to time, leave and expense management. Looking to take probably 30, 35 minutes or so and talk about, you know, the quick onset of COVID-19 and the impact it had on our organization, the key challenges that we are seeing from our customers out there, and then really, the best practices that we are seeing implemented to support this. And, you know, once we get through there at the end, we do have a question to answer, options out there. So any questions that you guys have, please feel free to ask at the end, and I will address them to the best of my ability.

For those of you that aren't familiar with DATABASICS, we are a global provider of timesheets and expense reporting software. We've been providing these solutions here for well over 20 years. Really, since the beginning of web-based solutions came to the marketplace, we've been providing these applications. We're headquartered in the greater Washington, DC area, and from an integration perspective, really work with all major accounting, HR and payroll solutions out there. As Jessica mentioned, we are a new Humentum industry partner. We're quite excited to be working with the members here within Humentum, although we've had a history of working with members over the last few years.

Some of our existing customers include organizations like CARE, Pact, Mercy Corps, Pathfinder International, and Search for Common Ground. So, although we've not officially been a member, we certainly have been working with the organizations that you guys work with and some of your partners out there. And really, our focus out there is to help organizations globally adapt to the challenges that take place. Some of those challenges are have quick onset, like we'll talk about today. Others are more gradual challenges out there and what we like to do is engage our customers to find out the best way to go out and address those challenges out there.

Specifically today, we're going to talk about time, expense and leave, and the impact out there. You know, and I guess the elephant in the room that we all are quite aware about is really the recent changes over the last six, eight weeks as it relates to COVID-19. We first all started hearing about COVID-19 or the coronavirus in the early part of this year. At that point, it was a virus that was spreading through Asia and for the most part was looking at other parts of the world. For those of us in the US, we weren't really aware of COVID-19 until, really the beginning of February. But as it approached the US, we saw a very quick change and a very large impact within our organization. Now, some of these numbers here are specifically for the US. Obviously, you guys, many are global organizations, but I thought it was some interesting numbers to look at how quickly these changes were coming.

On March 13th, according to Gartner, 13% of the US workforce was working remotely. By the time that weekend had ended, those numbers had more than doubled. And by the end of that third week in March, by Friday, March 20th, almost 71% of the US workforce had made the transition to working remotely. Today, those numbers are much higher. But what we saw is that this quick change impacted really three key areas out there. And the global impact really started with the productivity of organizations, the clients that they were looking to manage, and then obviously their corporate culture. For many of our customers, it was kind of a shock at all. We talked just a minute ago about how quickly this impact came. The shock and all was how quickly organizations were having to make decisions around these areas, how quickly they were needed to implement new processes, and then the other key challenges out there was did they have the ability to actually implement those. And so let's kind of talk about, you know, these three areas and what that impact looked like.

The first one we looked at, which was probably the one that again impacted us, you know, even individually, related to the overall productivity or I should say, the concerns around productivity. And it's interesting today, as we're into May, to think about, you know, the world today as it was even six weeks ago. And we look at some of those initial concerns that were taking place out there. You know, the first big area was the transition to a global remote workforce. Now, again, for some of the organizations that are sitting here on this call, you know, you're okay. You had a large remote workforce. But the way that remote workforce was adapting and changing based upon COVID-19 was very different. For those of us who were working in offices or making the transition at home, we had to look at how were we to support those individual users? Did we have a way to capture their time and expense details? Did we have new time and expense information that we needed to have collected out there? For folks that were in other parts of the world, did we have a quick and easy way to get those employees back into the US? What were the rules and regulations around the movement of those employees and how are we going to pay for those?

The other area we also saw was that now we had these big impacts on overall productivity. We had to make quick decisions out there. One of our largest customers who was a government contractor was sharing a story with us about the fact that as the initial onset came, they didn't know really how they were going to handle, you know, moving employees out of certain locations to the home. And so the initial thought was, we're going to have our employees go in and take their leave until we put in place a process. So, they asked employees to put in their leave. The executive team then met on a Tuesday and made a decision about an adjustment to the policy, and then 48 hours later, made another adjustment to that policy. Now, what's interesting is that wasn't the fact that they made a decision on their leave or that they made an adjustment. It only there was the fact that they were making a decision within a couple hour time frame where normally these decisions might be batted over a few weeks or months or even a year to come up with new policies out there.

And then the next piece, of course, was just the overall impact on the projects that we were working. So as organizations moved employees off of projects and grants that they were working on, you know, how are they going to manage and what did it look like as it related to that? Now, the productivity issue, and we talked about the challenges and impacts going back a few weeks. You know, one of the interesting stats I just saw over the last few days was that a new survey for HR professionals, in early April, job security was the number one concern overall for employees out there. And as of today, just four weeks later, the number one concern out there was putting in place technology and tools for the remote workforce. And so it's interesting to watch how, even over the last few weeks, the focus and how we're looking to address individual users and challenges out there has changed.

The second big area was, of course, compliance out there. You know, as we made a transition of these users, we saw a number of areas that we were looking to understand how that would impact the organization out there. For those employees that were changing where they were providing their work from, there was a question related to payroll and tax implications. For leave, for employees that were needing to take leave, did we have the ability to manage and track that leave? Are we able to see the individual details around that? And what would the impact be throughout the organization if we did ask people to take leave that maybe they had or are yet to accrue? And then, of course, the overall employee expectations. For many employees, working remote is something that is natural to them and they were doing already. For many other employees out there, the transition to working from home and remote was new. It certainly wasn't part of the job description when they took the job. And so them trying to understand what are the expectations of a remote employee. And, I'm sure you guys have there, talked to, you know, colleagues or friends out there, and I'm sure you've heard of a number of different scenarios played out as far as expectations from employers out there. You know, everything from you hear people where they're asking employees to leave their webcams on so they can operate almost as if they were in the corporate environment, to other areas out there where they have no expectation around that. And so I always say it's a very interesting time out there as organizations start to change and understand what the impacts are here of this new world reality.

And as it relates to that, I think that's probably one of the biggest areas that we see impact, is overall the corporate culture. You know, as this first, as COVID-19 first has the onset and the impact as it relates to the local organizations, there's no doubt, the first questions people were looking for us to help them address related to leave management and tracking time codes and looking at the overall impact as it relates directly to the organization and the business continuity. As we've gotten into this new norm, though, the corporate culture is suddenly becoming a large area that organizations are looking to address. Without a doubt, I think one of the biggest impacts here is this is really looking at your organization's corporate identity. Corporate identity for many of us is a very critical component, and it's something that you're able to control, especially if you're bringing employees into a single work environment. If you have corporate events, there's many things that you can do as it relates to those employees. My brother-in-law works for Amazon. He talks about their corporate culture often, and that corporate culture that they have teams set up in order to support those employees and provide that process.

Well, now, as you suddenly move those employees remotely into dispersed locations, it becomes much more difficult to control what that corporate culture looks like. And of course, this ultimately has an impact on the employee morale out there. You know, one of the interesting things here is that, you know, if you look at the stats that, you know, I read that 25% of HR professionals said that their people want better emotional support and clarity from their leadership, and also tips on how to work from home. And again, as we look at this, this wasn't necessarily something that you were looking at for employees, which really translates into those new management types. You know, I can speak from personal experience here. As part of the management team at DATABASICS, you know, my last 20 years, I've managed a team and interacted with other employees here within a single office environment out there. And now that I've trained, I've made that transition to remote employees, and what we're understanding is that communication is critical to the process, but also being more understanding of employees. You know, not everyone has the ability to have a dedicated workspace within their house. Certainly people have small children at home, numerous pets. And again, I'm sure we're all seeing this as we jump on corporate phone calls and video conferencing out there.

So as we looked at kind of the initial impact out here, we really looked at those three key areas out there: the overall impact as it relates to productivity, compliance, and then of course, your culture. And I'll talk in a minute here about some of the best practices and what people are doing to address these items out here.

Now, along with those areas that were impacted, we also saw some new legislation. This legislation was primarily for, we looked at the US, and again, with the Family First Coronavirus Response Act, we saw some new leave rules being implemented out there. And those leave rules were structured in a number of different facets out there. One related to, if you were personally impacted by coronavirus so that you've actually had the virus. The other rules we saw out there related to supporting family members and relatives as it relates to coronavirus. And within each one of those, it did have a different, you know, leave policy in place as far as how many hours people were allowed to take. But then there was also rules around the percentage of the pay they need to be reimbursed as it relates to that. And then again, there was also an additional ten weeks of paid expanded family and medical leave. You know, and so what we saw was new legislations coming in place as it relates to items we had to control. And then, of course, the CARES Act out there, which put in place new programs, which had mandatory spending out there, and then also some discretionary appropriations, and some of those obviously impacted as it relates to USAID and some emergency funds that were put out there.

So as we looked at the impact of what was taking place here over the last six weeks, really today, what we wanted to talk a lot about was the pillars for success to support today's workforce. And, again, a lot of this relates to some of the things that you were already comfortable with even remotely, but really look at the overall change overall as it relates to the success for today's remote workforce. One of the interesting things we saw is that the challenges out there aren't simply items that can be solved by putting in place, you know, just simply technology out there. And DATABASICS being a technology provider, yeah, that's something that we usually would walk out of an organization and talk about how, you know, you've got a specific challenge around leave, or you've got a specific challenge around how your timesheets are being managed and we can show you how our technology works and companies say that's great.

Really, what we're looking at today is expanding the technology and starting to look at a number of other areas out there. Certainly technology is important, and we'll talk about how you need to have the technology in place to support these processes. But really, the first piece here is looking at the process that you have in place. You know, some of the questions and one of the key questions that we get from a lot of our customers is we're putting in place new processes, and these processes are going across the organization. Do they need to be fair? Do we need to take into account that we understand we have different types of employees now and we're asking them to do different things from home? You know, again, we need to be more understanding that people may not always have the quietest place to do this work, or they may not be able to do this work due to childcare. They may need to do it early in the morning or later in the evening or so. You need to go ahead and have a good process in place.

The next thing you have to do, and this is really the biggest piece we're seeing now, is the ability to communicate. We've seen that there were some surveys out there that show that 45% of businesses say that employees want some sort of communication from their upper level management on a daily basis. That communication can either be done through video conferencing, email or just some sort of outreach. We see the ability to communicate why you're making changes to the process, what the impact is on the user. But overall, people want to have more communication these days now that they no longer have the ability to see someone in the hall or out in the field as their supervisor. And then really the fourth pillar out here is the adaptability of this overall process. There is no doubt there's more change coming. As all of us have experienced over the last six, seven weeks or so, we see that, you know, we're, we're sure that we saw very quickly right off the bat that things that we thought would happen one way happened another way and then changed again. So we have to be able to make sure that we have the ability to put together good technology, good process, strong communication, and also the recognition that there's going to be changes coming and that we all have to be adaptable to these processes.

So as we look at these four pillars, we want to start to apply them again to really the three key areas that we want to discuss here today. The first one, of course, would be leave management. Leave management was the first thing that customers contacted us with when the onset of the coronavirus came about six, seven weeks ago. People started to make this transition. What we saw was new policies out there as organizations struggled to figure out what to do as employees initially went to work from home. And what we then saw, certainly the impact as it relates to the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. But then we started having questions around items like donated leave, you know, are we going to give employees the ability to donate leave to others for those that had large amounts? And then the second piece of that became how do we track that information, the ability for us to go ahead and to set this up?

And so as we looked earlier at those pillars out there, the way we would handle this is we would have a customer sit down. We could talk with them, make sure they were comfortable with the new policy that they have, and then we would show them the ability to make those changes there within our software, have that technology take place. They could then communicate that out through message boards and emails within the software. But then of course, to make sure that there is the ability, as that moves forward, to go ahead and make adjustments as it takes place.

So from a leave perspective, again, it's important to understand what those new policies are, to have a place that's able to track them, and then, of course, to recognize that you have the ability to also go out and to make adjustments now as it relates to those new policies. What we also saw is that companies wanted to start to look to see, well, what was the impact of these policies? Do I have the ability to run reports and to see, you know, if we added to people's accrual process or if someone wants to give hours to someone else, to have the ability to see that information? And ultimately this leads to what we're seeing moving here in the forefront moving forward, which is, you know, one of the questions we have here is what happens if we all go back to work?

You know, it's funny to look at the transition from six weeks ago when everyone was concerned about how we track leave, to now the concern is okay, as states and countries start to open back up, what's going to happen as the employees go back to work? Are we suddenly going to see an instance where everyone has been cooped up in their house, they've been accruing vacations, and now they all only want to go on vacation again? And so, you know, we joke about it here within the office of, you know, when we all go back to work, are we all going to suddenly go on vacation? Are we going to have a scenario where the month of September, you're not going to be able to find anyone in the office because they are taking advantage of the fact that they have accrued a lot of vacation out there?

So from a best practice perspective, we are starting to see our customers start to actually implement some leave policies around that. They've put in place rules around making sure that they do have coverage for those critical roles in the organization. The way they're able to manage that is to be able to look within the solution, to see a calendar view, to see who's trying to take leave off when and where. We've also seen other customers out there who are actually starting to mandate employees take leave now. We have one customer out there, for example, who has asked employees to take four days of vacation between now and June 15th. Even though employees are working from home, they're asking them to take vacation just so they can start easing up some of those liabilities on the books, but also making sure that they're not going to have this rush as we go back to work. So employees are able to go ahead and take those vacation days.

As we move beyond kind of leave management, we start looking at the employee and time management. You know, and some of this becomes very basic as we look at the overall work that people are providing. You know, I mentioned one of the first areas the companies asked us about was leave codes and the ability to track leave. The second component of that was project tracking within the timesheet. They were coming to us to look to see if there was an ability to set up new project codes or task codes as it relates to projects, because within those timesheets, dependent upon where employees were performing the work, that data needed to be tracked. They were also looking to see what the overall impact was as employees were making the transition to home. Maybe there were fewer hours being spent working against a certain project or certain grants out there. So they wanted to be able to get into the solution and run reports to see how many hours are being inputted, what does that look like against the budget? And then again, if we needed to implement a new code or a new location code, they wanted to go ahead and see how that could be put in place.

Now, once that was put in place, what they wanted to do was make sure they were communicating that information back up to the user, to let the users know why those changes were made out there. And then the next piece here is back to work planning. What we've heard from most of our customers is that employees want to certainly be aware of what's taking place as it relates to back to work planning. Employees also want to have input into that process out there. It's a very interesting time for organizations out there. Obviously, we've been very sensitive to other scenarios in the workplace out there as it relates to, you know, really, again, just general rules out there. But as you look at this, you know, where is employees' individual comfort as it relates to going back to work? Are they living with older folks in the house and they want to lessen the threat of contracting something in the office and bringing it back home?

So back to work planning is something that is very big right now. We would recommend you definitely communicate that with your employees, but also bring the employees into that, into the mix as it relates to that conversation so that you understand and can show them that you are listening to their individual concerns out there. The other item as it relates to back to work planning, we're asking organizations to look at items such as staggered shifts. Again, everything in place to ensure that the employees are comfortable, but then also you're lessening any risk that may be out there as it relates to the coming months here and employees, quote, we say going back to work from that side.

And then really, the last piece out here we want to talk about is expense management. You know, as employees transitioned from the field into the home office, we received a number of questions out there as it relates to what we were paying for, what customers, what other customers are paying for out there. And so one of the first things we would say is it's critical to put in place a remote home office policy. Make it known to your user community what you do and don't pay for. If you want to implement a flat per diem, that's fine. Make sure you have a process in place so that you can put that per diem out and employees understand what that per diem is for. Do you have an expense management system to make it easy for the employee to put that per diem in? Or are there other items that you're going to expect that user to provide that?

New expenses that we've seen out there as companies going out and buying chairs for employees, paying for employees. Obviously, paying for Wi-Fi and other areas out there. So the transition to the home office has certainly come up with some new expense types out there. And as we look at those new expense types, we then get the questions of, well, how do we track those expense types? Is there an easy way for us to put that information into an expense reporting tool, or how do we provide that information within there? And then beyond the home office policies, we're now engaging companies out there as it relates to new travel policy. I had a question, actually, just yesterday, related to one of the individuals on my team, where he had a client who asked them to come out for an onsite meeting. It's been a long time, almost two months since we've seen that. And so his question to me was, the customer is asking us to come out. Are we allowed to go out there? And from our corporate travel policies, you know, we've talked about, you know, where we sit within our travel policy. And, you know, again, how that impacts, you know, not only what the customers are looking for, but what also our internal policies are out there. And of course, everything is around being safe and making sure that we are communicating this out to the individual users out there.

But as we look at changes to your expense process, changes to your leave process, changes to your time process, we always come back to really those first four pillars I was talking about out there, which is do you have the technology in place in order to make these changes? Has the process that you're looking at been vetted? And once you have that process in place, do you have the ability to communicate that out to your users? And then the last piece there is, of course, will that process allow you to adapt as future changes come? And so as we look at this, that's always going to be the way that we're going to look at how we look at all these changes out there as it relates to both time, expense and leave.

Now, the one certainty we know is that there is more uncertainty to come. There is no doubt that more changes, more changes are coming. As we talk to our customers out there, and even as we talk to prospects and new customers come to DATABASICS, one of the things that people continue to ask and find is, you know, the ability for our software to adjust to future changes out there. And I think everyone is aware that there are more changes coming. And so, you know, with that being said, you know, again, the general expectations for users out there is that, you know, there will be future modifications to the leave process, the time process and the expense process out there. What we say is this is a great opportunity right now to go out and to create and evaluate contingency plans. You probably had or maybe you didn't have a contingency plan as it relates to what took place here over the last six weeks or so. And if not, you know, use this time to go ahead and do that. Certainly rely on industry resources like Humentum and some of your peer organizations out there to bounce off ideas.

I know certainly in talking to Jessica, there's been a lot of talk within, you know, the Humentum message boards and communities about, you know, what are you doing around change? What are we doing around expense types out there? So we say, you know, please go out and talk to, you know, other industry resources. Just on a personal basis, I think it's very interesting. You know, some of the questions I've had from some of my friends out there and they've been asking us about, you know, what are you guys doing related to this or some other area out there? And I'm sure you guys are having those conversations in social settings, which are mostly over video these days, about, you know, does your company require you to be on video conference or not be on video conference? And so you rely on your peer and your peer organizations as it relates to that. And then the last piece, of course, is making sure you have the right systems in place, and within the right systems. Again, it's more than just simply technology out there, but it's the right systems for communication, the right process for communication, and understanding that those are the processes and those areas that the employees are comfortable embracing as it relates to those areas out there.

And then ultimately, again, you know, I do think there is some silver lining to the last few months. There certainly have been some tragic and some terrible impact from what's taking place from COVID-19, and there's no doubt the business impact is going to be something that's felt for a long time out there. But there are some silver linings, and it's one of the things that we within my organization work with. We continue to try to promote out there, which is embracing change. You know, I even talk about that on a personal level. I'm sure with everyone that's sitting here on this call over the last six, several weeks, you've probably done something or engaged in something that you probably never thought you would do in the past. And it may be as simple as getting takeout from a restaurant where you never thought you'd get takeout food from, or maybe it's wearing sweatpants for the same number of days out there. But, ultimately, you know, change isn't always bad. And as we look at this year, you know, we like to say, you know, turn these challenges into opportunities to become more efficient and effective.

You know, there is no doubt, as we look at the next four, six, nine months out, that you are going to see some changes into the way organizations are treating employees out there. You may see a greater move to remote workforce. You may see more Zoom and video type of conferences out there. The other thing you will see is that this was an opportunity to test some of the existing processes that you had in place and to see how well they work. So use this as an opportunity to make those changes that maybe you were putting off for one reason or another, and use some of this, what we want to call downtime, but some of this time, you know, where you have more focused effort to certainly make yourself more effective as it relates to the organization.

And then really, the last area out here is, you know, we're certainly seeing that the last few weeks have given organizations a more personal feel. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. But again, I'm sure for those of you on video calls that you got to start to get to see, you know, your coworkers' kids or their pets and some of those areas out there. But, you know, when most people take this job, you know, the idea wasn't that you were going to be welcoming your company into your home, but with the fact that we are making that move to remote workforce, it's giving us a more personalized approach. But it is also, when I say personalized approach, I'm talking about from a management style out there. Everything that we've heard and everything that I've read as it relates to the way to address this, it's very important that we take more time to understand what the employees are looking for and where their feelings and emotions are as it relates to some of these changes out there.

So again, as we talk about the way we want to address this, it's important that we are communicating with the employees out there, understanding that they are comfortable with the changes out there and that they ultimately understand what those changes are. And so with that, what I will do is, you know, turn the floor over to some questions out there and then just jump back in. But just any questions about what we've gone through here. Thanks again.

Q&A Session

Chris, this is all really important information. And like you said, we've been seeing lots of questions around this from our members. And so one of the questions or topics that you kind of touched on is leave and also just how potentially people may need more leave than they have available due to different circumstances. So, what are your suggestions on policies around donating leave and how best to manage that?

Yeah, so we've had a lot of questions around leave and how to manage it. And then again, what about people that don't have leave or are new employees out there? And so some of these are going to come back to the individual organization as far as where their corporate policy is out there. With that being said, I know as you look at leave management systems, most should have the ability for a couple things to take place. One is you can always create, basically a, an advanced bank of leave to someone out there. So basically, you know, go in there and give someone hours and let them use those hours with the understanding that they will accrue up against that.

The other opportunity is to donate. And again, it's, you know, operating kind of a communal fund out there as employees want to go out and use or donate some of their leave to other employees out there. And so, yeah, depending upon your individual, you know, organization policy out there, there certainly are softwares out there. I know I can speak from our side where you would give them the ability for someone to go out and again to donate, or again, if it's just something the organization is saying, we're going to go ahead and just give someone a lump sum of hours, there's the ability to do that. And then the other piece about that is, as you make these changes, of course, make sure that the process you have in place does have an audit trail. So you can see again who was able to manage that process and give those hours so that if there ever is a question somewhere down the road, as we do, you know, get back to a new normal, someone can say, okay, well, that was authorized by this person or by someone else. So I always say, make sure that, you know, as we look at this, that we have some sort of audits around. I didn't mention much about the timesheet side, but again, that is something. Audit trails are very critical out here because we are seeing adjustments and changes. I know many of your organizations obviously need to have that in place already, but make sure that you have a process to go in and audit to see where that change originated for these processes.

Great. Thank you. On that topic, still, I know one of our members mentioned that they were concerned about not having as much leave donated because everything is so uncertain. Have you seen people or your clients who already have leave donation policies in place either not seeing as much donation happening or about the same or higher?

Yeah, we're definitely seeing more. I mean, it's interesting. I think it's, you know, and you can relate this to a number of items out there, but I do feel like the last week, and again, I can speak personally from DATABASICS, but also seeing questions that are coming in from our customers out there, we are seeing more organizations kind of come together to help those individual employees out there. So even if you're not seeing donations from other employees, what we have seen is organizations creating their own new leave. You know, so they may come out and call it a, you know, just for sake of argument, call it a COVID-19 leave code out there. So they're basically creating these, their own leave codes, setting them up so it doesn't impact anything else that was already kind of predetermined within the organization, and then putting those out there to those individual employees out there. So, but there's, I will say we're actually seeing, we are seeing a large number of kind of donation of leave out there. But then the other area, we have also seen is a creation of a new, you know, again, I call it the COVID-19, I'm sure someone can come up with a more creative leave code than that, but that's basically what we're seeing are being used to create.

And just as a reminder, if you do have questions, you can pop them in the questions or chat box, and we'll be happy to get those answered. Another question, you had mentioned, you know, the concern that once everyone is able to move around a little bit more, that all of a sudden everyone may be requesting leave. So are you seeing more organizations implementing stricter or different leave request policies to manage either that now or with the kind of future view of what may happen once things are more open?

Definitely. So it's interesting. We've seen that a lot. And so, anyhow, it also depends on the resource and where they sit within the organization out there. You know, and it really comes down in a couple different areas. The biggest one that is probably at risk right now, and when I say at risk, I should say is that, you know, to the organization is use-it-or-lose-it policies out there. You know, especially as employees continue to work from home. If you've got a policy in place where everyone has to use their leave by the end of the year, obviously you have a, you know, in years past, what you normally saw is employees would disappear, you know, the end of December days, they may start, you know, December 18th, 19, 20, you know, taking advantage of that week between, you know, the Christmas and New Year holiday in those areas out there because they'd have to use everything by December 31st. Nowadays that number is really starting to expand out there. So we have seen a number of organizations loosen up the rules around use-it-or-lose-it. So they may push those into next year. The other area out there is that we are seeing companies go in and implement with a leave request tool the restrictions on number of people that can be gone over a certain period of time. Now again, it depends upon the type of resource that you have out there. You know, if you've got someone in the finance group, you can't lose your entire finance team for the same week in July and things like that. Maybe for another group, it's not a big deal if you've got everyone out the same week. And so we see companies implementing leave policies that relate to other workers out there, just making sure that they have coverage for key items out there.

And then the other one, which I mentioned, is we are seeing companies go out and actually have people start taking leave right now. You know, it's interesting. You know, again, as speaking from a management perspective at DATABASICS, I've got my first leave request from one of my employees just the other day. They're trying to take their birthday off next week. But again, in years past, if we were in the office, you know, people would be asking for that all the time. And so people are, you know, certainly taking advantage of that, that people aren't, you know, that they don't really need to be taking leave to take a few hours off to go to, you know, to go to a doctor's appointment if we were doing that and those sort of items out there. So, the one I mentioned that some companies are forcing employees to start taking some of that leave now as it relates to so that again, they don't see a large influx coming up once people get back to work.

Great. Thank you. And how do you see the organization supporting remote entry of expenses? So if they didn't have an online platform already, are you seeing a lot of transformations around that?

Definitely. So, you know, it's interesting for a business like ours that's focused on, you know, automating time and expense reporting. You know, we've seen, in the first week or two, as people made the transition home, we had a tremendous number of support tickets out there as companies were asking for how to modify and change and adapt their existing process to what's taking place. As someone that manages the sales organization, the last four weeks have been quite busy for us as organizations are looking to implement plans to support the current process but also moving into the future. And so, you know, for like remote employee expenses, the ability for someone to be able to get all that data digitized and taking pictures of receipts and submitting electronically so that someone does not need to be in the office to, you know, physically get those receipts and look at those spreadsheets and rekey that data into the accounting system out there.

An automated expense tool gives an organization the ability to basically touchlessly move the expense and the supporting documentation through the accounting process without anyone having to touch it. So it's a quick, easy way to automate. And it's ultimately helpful for the users out there. But the other piece of automation, which I didn't mention in there, was as it relates to some of the new policy. So for organizations that are implementing like a flat per diem, where they may say, we're going to give you $200 a month to cover your Wi-Fi, you know, maybe your cell bill or whatever else you need to have, an automated expense tool will also allow an ability for the user to basically just select a per diem and, you know, auto-populate that data. So you don't need to do any sort of modifications to an existing spreadsheet or obviously a paper form. It allows a very quick transition to push that out to the user and the user sees that.

Great. So I think that is the last of the questions kind of on the topic. And so just one quick one about DATABASICS. So if somebody wanted to transition to using your tools and, you know, they're trying to react quickly to everything going on in the world, how would they get their policy set up? And about how long does it take using DATABASICS?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, typical is probably the easiest. I would say typical is a similar process to set up with any other piece of software out there, and it depends upon the complexity, but we would typically look at about four to eight weeks to set a customer up from beginning to end. Again, it depends upon your individual complexity and, you know, certainly looking at the Humentum membership organizations out there, the ones we've worked with, you know, you look at a group within the US and then you start looking at some of the other groups within that, you know, globally. But really the process is just to sit down, have some of our services team do sort of business analysis to understand exactly the rules you're looking to implement, provide you some input and certainly some support from a best practices perspective. And then it's a matter of basically configuring the solution, testing it and rolling it out.

You know, but we typically look at about four to eight weeks would be a typical process. We can do it faster. We have done it faster. Certainly some organizations are, you know, looking for very quick turnaround right now, but it's certainly something we're happy to discuss with companies. And again, you've got my contact information there, and if someone has any questions, we're happy to provide some additional data.

Great. Thank you. So I think that's all of our questions. If there's anything else you'd like to add in just kind of based on what else has been brought up, please feel welcome to do that. As Chris said, just kind of as a wrap up, Chris's contact information is here. The recording, as well as the slides and an information sheet on DATABASICS, will also be included in the follow up email. Chris, thank you so much for your time. And, you know, yeah, if there's anything else you'd like to add on, please, please do so.

Yeah. Okay. Well, no, there's nothing else for me. But thank you, everyone, for the time today. And thank you, Jessica, for the offer. We so appreciate it. Thank you.